CD Projekt Red has not one, not two, but three The Witcher games in development, both in-house and with closely linked third party partners. Project Sirius, Project Polaris and Project Canis Majoris are all early in development, but their confirmation marks a significant investment in CDPR’s biggest gaming IP.
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Project Polaris is the one we all know about, the full follow up to The Witcher 3 that’s in development within CD Projekt Red’s Polish studios and will kick off a brand new trilogy of games, but CDPR has now laid out a little more of their vision for this trilogy as a whole. From the launch of the first game, they expect to complete the trilogy within six years, meaning a new The Witcher game every three years. The first of these titles is still in pre-production, however, and the studio is surely still getting to grips with their jump Unreal Engine as the basis for their future games.
Beyond that, Project Sirius is in development by The Molasses Flood and with support from CDPR – currently around 60 employees are involved. The game promises to be “an innovative take on The Witcher universe telling an unforgettable story for existing Witcher fans and new audiences.” A part of that will be multiplayer, it’s also been confirmed, with the studio best known for survival and base-building games The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow, from before their acquisition by CDPR last year.
Lastly, Project Canis Majoris is another story-driven, single player open-world RPG set within The Witcher universe, and it’s being developed by a third party studio founded by ex-Witcher veterans. They’ll be using Unreal Engine 5, much like CDPR’s internal teams, and the tools that are being created to supplement that work, so clearly the ambitions here are quite high, but it’s likely that this will be seen as a spin-off to those upcoming games.
There’s a lot of The Witcher games in the pipeline, but CDPR also confirmed that a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, which will be created by their North American studios with development starting next year, and they have another brand new IP which is currently in “incubation” codenamed Project Hadar.
All of this has come from a rather long term look at the studio’s plans. The most immediate work is coming on the Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Doctrine, due out in early 2023, and The Witcher 3’s PS5 and Xbox Series X|S upgrade, but after that we can expect there to be a long, multi-year wait before new projects are shown publicly. While CDPR is spreading their efforts with multiple internal and external teams, all of these games are at best in pre-production, the company as a whole is jumping to a different game engine, and there will be all of the growing pains and change that is common to game development.
Source: CDPR
